Duolingo app or ONline course with French institute? - learning French 11 years old

[stripes11]

My DS will be starting secondary school next year, so wante dto start lerning French. We subscribed to this app. Has anybody been successful using it? Alternatively, there is online course with French institute...

Ds tried duolingo and Tbh didn't find it useful for school French. If doesn't actually explain anything to you about verbs tenses etc. School French (in Scotland) is very much about limited topics. Society, employability, culture etc which duolingo didn't really touch on.

We found a book for Scottish nat5 which also had online listening resources which was much better. If also had lots of relevant phrases ds put on flash cards and revised that way (although you could inadvertently teach bad pronunciation habits).

My dc has been using duolingo and memrise, about 5 minutes a day for couple of years. Has been getting 100% on French test at school so far.(yr7). Definitely simple and easy thing you can do to familialise kids before start learning at school.

Ds1 started using Duolingo when he started secondary as he was learning German. He did it every day, just 5 minutes or so and in about year 9 he combined it with Memrise and did both.

School then brought in Memrise in year 10 which seemed more geared toward the GCSE content. He continued to use both.

He got an 8 in his GCSEs last year using it.

Also Ds2's French teacher asked if he had done French in primary school as his was of a higher level than others in the class. I explained he did Duolingo daily.

DD used Duolingo ahead of starting French formally at school. It did help give her confidence in her ability to learn a second language, which was an issue for Herat the time. I signed up for Duolingo this year and it’s amazing how much I remember from three decades ago! I do enjoy the structure, repetition, and there are notes/tips before each segment which explain some of the content matter.